HOW PLANTS LIVE AND WORK. 337 



mous advances in botanical knowledge have been made. And as 

 the historian pores over dusty manuscripts and musty tapestries, 

 as the antiquary weaves a romance of prehistoric man round the 

 chipped piece of flint he picks up on the moor, so the botanist, in 

 the humble Horsetail, sees visions of a far-off age long before the 

 "everlasting hills" of the Pennine Range were raised, when 

 flowering plants had not yet come into existence, and when the 

 swampy land was covered with thick forests of trees which have 

 long ago become extinct. 



At the enormously remote period when our coal was being 

 formed, the monarchs of the plant world consisted of what are 

 called Vascular Cryptogams. Of this ancient stock there are now 

 only three surviving families — the Club-mosses, the Ferns, and the 

 Horsetails. As the life-history of these is, speaking broadly, very 

 similar, we may take a Fern as a familiar and fairly representative 

 type. It will not be necessary to enter in any detail into the daily 

 life of an individual Fern, for in all essential respects this corres- 

 ponds with what we have seen to be the case in our Wallflower. 

 The Fern obtains its mineral food from the soil by means of its 

 roots, and its carbonaceous food from the air by the agency of 

 the chlorophyll granules of its leaves, just in the manner I have 

 already described ; but it reproduces its kind in a fashion quite 

 different from the methods in vogue among flowering plants. If 

 we examine the lower side of the leaf or frond of a " Male Fern" 

 (which, by the way, is no more male than female), we shall pro- 

 bably see a number of small, brown, kidney-shaped scales. Each 

 scale is attached to the leaf by a short stalk, and the structure 

 thus bears a rough resemblance to an umbrella. Attached to the 

 bottom of the short " handle " of the " umbrella " by stalks are 

 several tiny boxes, somewhat like pill-boxes. Each box con- 

 tains when ripe about fifty minute grains, which may thus 

 be likened to the pills of the pill-boxes. These " pills " are 

 called spores. Summing up thus far, we may say then that the 

 spores are formed in spore-boxes, which are attached by stalks to 

 the surface of the frond, each group of spore-boxes being covered 

 by a protective scale. There is a great deal of variation in the 

 way the spore-boxes are arranged on the fronds of diff"erent Ferns ; 

 for instance, in the Bracken Fern the spore-boxes arise near the 



